Disclaimer: Although some of this article is fact, most of it is my personal opinion. I'm in no way saying that people who like the government and/or the current candidates are bad people. I'm only suggesting ways to improve it. Now, on with the show.

This is part three of my series on how to better the election. Since it is coming up in just a week, I think it's best to do this series. Now we can all agree that there are things about the government that aren't particularly perfect. To be fair, the government won't be perfect for everyone. Going back to my last article, I said that it's better to have everyone's second choice rather half be their first and half be their last. So I've covered mostly how to better the national elections (although there is one more topic I'd like to cover on that next week), but what about local elections? What can we do to better those?

Enter solution:

3. Single Transferrable Vote (STV)

In this world, more specifically in this country, everybody has an opinion. One that some people think should be valued over everyone else's. Leading there to be multiple people who different ways of thinking, different opinions. Originally that's why the states were created, but that's no longer the case.

Now, with these states, the nation as a whole still needs to make rules and laws that everybody goes by. They'd like to see what the general population thinks, but can't because of the sheer mass of the population. So they decide to get representatives from each state.

Going back, everybody thinks differently, but some people do think alike. To represent these different kinds of people, let's replace them with animals. Say...monkeys, gorillas, tigers, bobcats, owls, and buffalo. Now the main person at the head of government or the government itself we shall call The Lion King, because who doesn't like a good Disney reference.

Now, The Lion King has divided up his country into many territories or states. Within these states normally live all of the different kinds of animals, but all states seem to have a higher monkey race than any other animal. usually around a third of the population. So what happens is that when election day comes and all of the animals must vote for a candidate, the monkey usually wins. Thus, filling the entire government representatives with only monkeys. This makes the other two-thirds of the population quite frustrated. The Lion King sees this as a problem and offers to forgo the state lines and just have national representatives. But realizes that although this is a good idea for small countries, a country this big require local laws as well.

So The Lion King has to find a way to have proportional representation among the animals as representatives while still having local representatives. After doing some research, she finds out something called Single Transferable Vote.

With this, many things would change. First, instead of sending only one representative, they'd send more than one. So let's say five animals are up for election in a state: Owl, Gorrila, Monkey, Tiger, and Bobcat. Three of which can become representatives.

To determine how many votes someone needs in order to win, you would take the percent of votes total (usually 100%) and divide it by how many representatives you need. In this case, 33%.

So election day comes and goes and the results are in.

Owl: 5%

Gorrilla: 28%

Monkey: 33%

Tiger: 21%

Bobcat: 13%

Since monkey has 33%, he already gets to be representative, but what about the other two representatives? Who gets picked?

It all has to do with how people vote. Remember approval voting? It's kind of like that. What happens is that instead of picking just one person that's your favorite, you actually rank them from most liked to least liked. This is important.

So the first step to determining who gets the next vote is by getting rid of the votes for the biggest loser. In this case, the Owl. Now when the Owls votes, they ranked Gorrila as their second choice. So with S.T.V., their votes get transferred to Gorrila, thus putting him at 33%. We do this again to determine the third winner, and we get Bobcat's votes to go to Tiger, putting him at 34% and as the third winner.

The Lion King finds this system to work well, but it provides some problems. First, what happens if only two races are running? In this case, if a candidate ever gets more than 33%, their extra votes go to the second choice. I'd provide another explanation but then we'd be here all night. If you want to see a more detailed explanation on the process of how S.T.V. works, check out the video below.

But at its basics, here's how it works. First, any candidate with enough votes gets to be a representative. Second, any extra votes go to the voters second choice. Third, if there are still spots left to be filled then the votes from the biggest loser goes to their second choice. Fourth, repeat this process until enough candidates are elected.

The reason this works is obvious. So that people can get proportional representation in the elections while still voting locally. It's a system that I find very interesting and should be placed even in small elections for things like school presidents and really any time when you're voting.

Going back to my previous article on approval voting. If you want a simple way to vote, do approval voting. But if you want to vote for more than one thing, use the Single Transferrable Vote system and everything will be great.

That's what I have for this time, I apoligize for the length, it was a lot to cover. But come back next week where I talk about the final way on how the election can be made better: creating the show "Who wants to be President of the United States".

Also here's that video I mentioned: